Richard Weiner: a European mind

In this edition of Czech Books we look at the work of Richard Weiner, a
Czech writer of the first half of the twentieth century, who was immensely
influential on his own and later generations of writers and yet today is
little read and little known outside the Czech Republic. Even within the
country, among the writers of the period of the First Republic, he is far
from being a household name. This neglect is very much undeserved, and one
person who has been trying to draw attention to Richard Weiner and his
legacy is the translator and literary scholar, Martin Tharp.

Martin TharpWhat made you interested in this almost forgotten Czech writer?

“I would first say that he is not almost forgotten, but he is definitely
a kind of minority taste. He was officially neglected during the years of
“normalization”; not that they disapproved of him for anything that he
wrote. He was not in any way a programmatic anti-communist, or even have
much of a definite political position most of the time. However, they did
disapprove of him simply for being Jewish, cosmopolitan and modernist.”

And that was enough to be going against the grain of socialist realism of
virtually the whole period of the post-war.

“That’s true. At the same time I think it is not so much even a
question of communist ideology, but he went so much against even a kind of
Czech national self-conception. For one thing, he was very closely tied to
artistic life within Paris, where he lived as the Lidové noviny
correspondent throughout the 1920s up until the late 1930s.”

I think this is an important point to make. He was a Czech writer, but he
spent most of his active life and career outside the country.

“That’s true… mostly in Paris and what is also interesting is that
at the time when Czech literature and art looked towards Paris for their
chief inspiration, he was actually there, and he knew people. Every time
that a new book by Proust would come out, he would review it in Lidové
noviny for that very week, even before it was translated. At the same time
though, he was writing his own literary work, which is what his reputation
is built on – even though his journalism makes such wonderful reading
that you don’t want to pick up one of today’s newspapers!”

Here is a short extract from one of his newspaper articles:

In a single life the average person reads many a stupid book, sees
countless bad theatre productions and hears endless hours of poor music,
and so often trembles in convulsions before all sorts of colour imprints.
Likewise he sees films that are foolish, falsely comic, falsely tragic.
Indeed, so many types of tastelessness saturate our lives, let this be
taken as fully valid coinage. If, though, one meets with the most stupid of
stupidities that knows whereof it is and nonetheless hopes to amuse one,
the reaction is to rise up in indignation against such a suggestion. For
there is for me nothing more unbearable than when a fool has the daring to
take me for a greater one. As far back as my memory can reach, I cannot
remember having met with a greater idiocy than now exists in the cinema.
That it precisely transpired in cinematography pains me, since up to now I
have held it in esteem.

(trans.: Martin Tharp)

So we can see that he was an outspoken critic…

“Very definitely. But at the same time as this, his own writing, both in
prose and in poetry, is very different. He started out as a poet, and I
should add that, though he was from a Jewish family, much like that of
Kafka, he was not from Prague, but from the provincial town of Písek in
South Bohemia, an area where almost exclusively Czech was spoken – even
though he was by-and-large bilingual in German. Secondly, when he started
off as a poet before World War I, most of his poetry was still fairly
lyrical and romantic, celebrating the strength of nature. That all lasted
up until he was mobilized, first in 1913 to Bosnia - then part of the
Austro-Hungarian Empire - and then again, after the attack in Sarajevo he
was sent back to the front. He suffered a nervous breakdown, was invalided
out of service, and during that time he wrote what I would consider to be
his first truly mature work. It is a series of stories from his experience
of the war, the horror of modern trench warfare.

“And after that, also in the immediate post-war years, he completed his
second volume of short stories, called “Škleb” (The Grimace), which is
in my view probably one of the finest things he wrote. Then he stopped. He
stopped his creative work altogether, went to Paris, wrote his pieces for
Lidové noviny, and did not seem to want to do anything more than that.”

This changed when Weiner introduced his friend, the Czech painter Josef
Sima, to some of his French artist and writer acquaintances, most
importantly René Daumal and Roger-Gilbert Lecomte, who were interested in
the ideas of the surrealists, but at the same time had doubts about the
Marxist and anti-religious tone of André Breton’s surrealism. Unlike
Breton they felt that they could reach other poetic realms not just through
the dream but even through mysticism or religious ecstasy. This encounter
led to the emergence of a group called Le Grand Jeu (The Big Game). From
the start Weiner played an important role in the group, in the process
falling in love with the much younger Lecomte. The encounter was to
influence his literary career.

“He returned to writing poetry and eventually to his last volume of
prose. But the one thing to remember is that after his two final prose
volumes, he increasingly suffered from stomach trouble, which turned out to
be cancer of the stomach. In 1936 he left Paris, returned to Prague, moved
in with his sister and within a year he was dead, almost as if he knew what
was coming.”

As someone of Jewish origin, he would have been unlike to have survived
the Holocaust.

“I have chosen an extract from one of his stories called ‘The Voice in
the Telephone’, from the volume, ‘The Grimace’. I should begin by
explaining the plot of it. It is the story of a man who refers to himself
as a hermit of the metropolis, a solitary confirmed bachelor. One day,
sitting in his usual chair in the café, he is called to the telephone. A
mysterious female voice on the telephone says to him, ‘I’m in love with
you, but I can’t reveal who I am.’ In fact, throughout the story, he
never finds out who this person is. This extract is from the middle of the
story:"

Fourteen days had passed since that encounter in the café, and I had seen
no persons unknown to me. Today, however, the voice again spoke into the
telephone, and into that instrument for which we had made our agreement –
so laugh, if you so wish. In any event, you may think whatever thought you
find preferable.

“What is it that you demand? That I had promised, while making my
invitation, that I would come as well? If I had wished to reveal myself,
would I have chosen so convoluted a path? And if I love you, of which you
have no doubt, fearing all the while to appear before you, would I have
wished upon you such an awkward situation? I never have seen that woman
whom you describe.”

“Such a turn of phrase is one we occasionally use if we speak of
ourselves. But this joke has gone a bit stale. I know that the unknown
woman was you.”

“Is that what you believe?”

“More than believe: know!”

“Then all that I can now do is to disappear forever. For you have
betrayed me.”

“I betrayed you?!”

“Yes, for you do not believe the only thing that is reality: the
word.”

“You promised me a sign. Now give it!”

“I have given you countless signs for you to believe that I am who I
am.”

“I never noticed a one of them, and asked you in vain for a sign that
was apparent. In addition, I have no doubts that you are who you are.”

After a pause, she spoke:

“There is no time for jesting. Was it not I who started this
fermentation in your mind? Was not I the cause of it, when upon that one
day you noticed how long the path may be towards others, yet for all that a
path of which you had never known before? Was I not the cause of it, when
you began to notice with much closer attention things diminutive and
subordinate? Who
else but I whipped up within you the desire, and the question of whether
you are indeed attractive to women? And why, then, do you persist along
that course that leads nowhere, unless it is to death.”

(trans.: Martin Tharp)

There is a very distinct similarity to Kafka in this writing.

“I would say very definitely that it is similar to Kafka, but at the
same time, you could also find so many other references in this, because he
bore so much of the world of Habsburg Vienna within himself, and at the
same time was able to touch upon equally the world of French modernism, of
the great importance of the dream and the unconscious, and the unknowable.
The way that he was able in his life to bring these two elements together
really does mark him out as a kind of genius of the twentieth century. But
at the same time, he really is, because of it, outside of even the main
currents of Czech modernism, which were -most of them – born around 1900
and too young to be called up for military service. They simply saw the new
world, the post-war order, as a kind of ecstatic liberation, which Weiner
never did. He never could have. And of course for that reason their
ecstatic liberation included an enchantment with Marxism and later, in the
case of many of them, they turned into complete cultural functionaries
after the communist coup of 1948, a form of mental coarseness which Weiner
never had. This made him perhaps more influential for dissident literary
life in the 70s and 80s. He was to a certain extent rediscovered during
that time as someone who did not succumb to these siren-songs of
modernity.”

And he has never been translated into English.

“That is something I have always found strange – that no one has yet
taken him up, possibly because his own command of Czech is very unusual. He
had a great love for archaic forms of grammar, even deliberate archaisms of
style that at the time when he wrote must have sounded more than a bit
strange or backwards.”

You have taken up the challenge of translating some of his work.

“I have done so, I think, because he really is a kind of European mind,
that brings in the experience of trench warfare in Serbia, of cafés of a
provincial capital of the Habsburg Empire and a close connection with the
Parisian avant-garde, as well as just the fact that his stories are just so
enjoyable to read at the end of the day.”